


Dialogic: Season 3

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Dialogic [4]
Category: Castle
Genre: F/M, Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Jealousy, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-09 20:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 17,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19483405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: After watching around to the end of the series (i.e., "Hollander's Woods," because nothing after that exists), and taking some time to watch a few other things during workouts, I'm back around to the beginning of the series again.This story is 24 brief sketches, one for each episode of Season 3, inspired by a line of dialogue from the episode.I did the same thing for Seasons 1 and 2, but there's no reason you couldn't read this story (or any chapter of any of these stories) independent of the others.





	1. Quotidian—A Deadly Game (3 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has a routine. She’s had a routine all summer.

> _“You’re not even going to ask me how my summer was?”  
>  —Richard Castle, A Deadly Affair (3 x 01)_
> 
> * * *

She has a routine. She’s had a routine all summer. She closes a case, she goes home, she works the case behind the shutters. Her mother’s case. She works until her body is exhausted and her mind is dragging along behind it. She works and works and doesn’t think about him.

It’s effective, for the most part. Her mother’s case, the old details and the new, are all-consuming. She hammers away at every single thing about Dick Coonan and the other victims—every single bit of minutiae she can unearth. And when the facts run dry, she knits them together. She tries to. She lets her mind tell stories about how it might all make sense, but that doesn’t count as thinking about him. Even when her mind travels sideways into high-level conspiracies, it doesn’t count.

She has a routine, and nothing about that needs to change just because he’s back. That’s what she tells herself as she goes through the motions that night. She thinks about how to get home, whether it’s a nice enough night to walk, or if it’s too nice and the sidewalks will be too crowded with people and conversations and life for her to stand it.

She thinks about food. What she’s picked up or called in too recently. She thinks about whether she’s even hungry enough to make it worth the interaction—the small talk and nicknames and tired jokes because she doesn’t want to be anyone’s regular, but she is. She’s become a regular at three, four, five places within a stone’s throw of her apartment, because she has a routine.

She walks that night. The first night he’s back, though she doesn’t think about it that way. She doesn’t think about him. She takes a round-about path less traveled by couples and families and wine-bar gaggles of girlfriends strolling on a warm autumn night. She skips food. She’s too keyed up to be hungry. She’s too eager to be in her own well-ordered space with the work unfolded in front of her.

She checks the mail. A twist of the key and a direct transfer of more or less everything to the trash that sits there in the lobby. She climbs the stairs. Another twist of the key and she shuts the world out. She sheds her work clothes and drags her hair up into a twist to keep it out of the way.

She takes a breath and throws open the shutters. She reaches for the sharpie and a blank index card. She closes her eyes and takes another breath to call up whatever ideas have been bubbling in the part of her mind that’s always working on this, now that she lets it. She takes a breath and pushes away everything else. She doesn’t think about him—the fact that he’s back, he’s in a relationship, she knows with whom, and he missed her, too. She doesn’t think about him. She has a routine.


	2. Delphic—He’s Dead, She’s Dead (3 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The death of Uncle Chet is a mess. It’s a minefield.

> _“I guess it’ll have to remain a mystery.”_   
>  _—Kate Beckett, He’s Dead, She’s Dead (3 x 02)_
> 
> * * *

The death of Uncle Chet is a mess. It’s a minefield.

It’s awful for his mother, of course, and that’s his first concern. For her sudden, shocking loss and all its reverberations. For the absurdity of the ring on her finger and the farce she has to endure just when she ought to have the time and space to figure out how and who and what to mourn, because there’s Chet, gone in an instant, and there’s the fact that it’s simply not true that he was “so young.” It’s simply not true that she is, and he feels the force of that terror right along with her.

There’s the end of a love story fifty years in the making. There’s the aching, ever-after ambiguity she’ll have to live with, because she’ll never know now what they might have been to one another if things had played out as she’d been so recently imagining. If Chet would have fought again to keep her. If she would have come to see that he was the love of her life, too, or if they’d have been dear friends or sworn enemies or nothing at all.

It’s a terrible, awkward mess for his mother. It’s a mess of a different kind for him.

It’s temptation if he’ll let it be. It’s the universe crying out that time is too short and life is too uncertain for things to go on as they are now. It’s a minefield, because he doesn’t know what that means.

He’s happy enough with things as they are now. He has Gina and the satisfaction—the thrill—of navigating those tempestuous waters. He has the work that he missed more than he let himself admit over the course of an elastic summer that drew itself painfully out, then snapped into no time at all in the unforgiving light of the interrogation room.

He has her. Beckett, not Kate, and that’s for the best, he thinks.

He thinks, and the universe cries out again. He doesn’t know what it wants from him. He doesn’t know if he’s meant to do the work or let it work itself out. He doesn’t even know what it is.

He doesn’t know how to weigh the hard truths of Uncle Chet’s cautionary tale against the romance of Albert and Loreen and the self-sorting universe. He doesn’t know what to do with the fact that the murder of Emilio Casillas might be a crime, but the satisfaction in solving—in uncovering it in the first place—is muted, given the cruelty and cowardice just barely beneath the surface of his passion and chemistry.

It’s a relief when his mother comes to him, a few tear-stained pages clutched in her hand. The eulogy. It’s a relief that she needs him to bring all he thinks, all he knows, to bear.

It’s a relief that there’s something he can do about the death of Uncle Chet, even though it’s a mess. It’s a minefield.


	3. Snapshot—Under the Gun (3 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She shuts the picture up in her desk drawer right after she snatches it out of Castle’s hand.

> _“You were a girl once.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Under the Gun (3 x 03)_

* * *

She shuts the picture up in her desk drawer right after she snatches it out of Castle’s hand. As soon as he’s caught up laughing with Royce—conjuring up the next thing he wants to know about who she was and how she came to be—she shoves it deep between the pages of some boring NYPD manual and locks the drawer for good measure.

It stays there.

The case unfolds with and without Royce, and it stays there. She propels him into the waiting arms of a uniform for processing on rinky-dink charges—obstruction, aiding and abetting, unlawful use of this in the commission or that—and it stays there.

She falls into her desk chair after an impromptu treasure hunt with Castle, and it stays there. She lets her head drop into her hands and lets the memory wash over her—an unguarded moment in the dark of the cemetery with her arms thrown around him, his arms thrown around her—and it stays there.

She doesn’t pull the picture out. She sits alone with her sins, past and present, winding close around her. She doesn’t stare at it or let the sharp corners press into her fingertips. She doesn’t dwell or cast her mind back to who she was in the moment the shutter clicked.

She couldn’t if she wanted to, not now. That person, that woman, that girl has been unmade by the present. By the painfully recent past, and the picture is a mere object. It is a relic—mechanical, optical, chemical—of light bent to a particular purpose then, bent to another just then, just now.

She can’t cast her mind back, but her body perversely remembers. It offers up the sensation of tight, tired lines around her eyes as she squinted in the direction of Royce’s voice rising up from over her shoulder. It feels the scorching sun bouncing off the dark hood of the patrol car to burn the skin as she planted her fists. It recalls the rivulets of sweat dampening the heavy knot of hair at the nape of her neck and the carefree, swing set sensation of her feet dangling to knock against the driver’s side tire. Her body inhabits the shutter-click moment and passes through it.

She thinks about burning it. In the last scissor-blade flash of emotion, she envisions holding one sharp corner until the greedy flame laps at her fingertips, but she passes through that, too.

She takes it home, in the end. She turns the key in the lock and riffles through the pages of the boring NYPD manual until she finds it. She shoves it in her bag without looking. Entirely without the temptation to look. She tacks it up on the left-hand shutter underneath the file photo of Detective Raglan, off to the side from notes taken in a frantic hand by flashlight. By a person, a woman, a girl unmade by the present. By the painfully recent past.


	4. Fact Finding—Punked (3 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He starts off quite literally on the wrong foot. The morgue’s swinging double doors are awkward to manage with a wax-paper bakery bag in one hand and a copy of Naked Heat under the opposite arm. He stumbles in just when he wanted to be at his confident, charming best.

> _“The fact that she hasn’t told you is how we know it’s real.”  
> _ _—Martha Rodgers, Punked (3 x 04)_

* * *

He starts off quite literally on the wrong foot. The morgue’s swinging double doors are awkward to manage with a wax-paper bakery bag in one hand and a copy of _Naked Heat_ under the opposite arm. He stumbles in just when he wanted to be at his confident, charming best.

“Dr. Parish?” His voice breaks—an actual, full-on Peter Brady _break_ —and he very nearly turns tail and walks back out.

 _“Castle!”_ Lanie yelps. She leaps back from the body on the table and presses one hand to her heart. “What in the hell are you doing all the way up here at the crack of dawn?”

The flash of scalpel in her free hand heartens him, strangely enough. Maybe it’s a focal point for his fight or flight response, or maybe he just hopes she’ll kill him quickly. Either way, he inches toward her. He calls up a smile and holds out his hands.

“I come bearing bear claw.” He swings the bag enticingly, then adds with considerably less confidence, “And books.” He flashes the hardcover, then tucks it back under his arm as he grows more sheepish by the second. “Book, anyway.’ 

“You’re bringing me a bear claw in _here?”_ She tips her head toward the body and plants a fist, on one hip. “What am I Perlmutter?”

“No!” he says hastily. He thinks of Perlmutter hunched over his sandwich—his _pickle spear—_ at the self-same stainless steel table. “Definitely not …” He trails off, sounding defeated. Feeling defeated. The bag drops to his side. “I could kill someone,” he offers with a miserable grin. “Then they’d call you. I’d deliver a fresh bear claw for you to enjoy in the great outdoors.”

“Quite a plan,” Lanie snorts. Her posture softens by a fraction of a degree. “Except Beckett would arrest your ass before you could get to that fancy bakery.”

“Beckett,” he repeats, not at all of his own volition. He freezes. His gaze lifts slowly, and he knows before he meets hers that she’s on to him.

“Mmhmm. Figured that’s what this was about.” She sizes him up and weighs his fate. She relents with a shake of her head. She drops the scalpel on to the stainless steel tray, letting it clatter for emphasis. Letting him know that his soul and a feather are still on the scales. “Come on.”

He follows her through a into a cramped office. He’s only ever glimpsed it through the blinds. He’s curious out of professional habit. A sliver of his mind catalogs the details: Bold, passive–aggressive labels on plastic in and out trays tell the tale of too many people sharing the space. Lanie picks up a stack of file folders listing precariously on a wheeled stool and dumps them unceremoniously on to the lone, already cluttered desk.

“Sit.”

She indicates the newly cleared stool with a glance and holds an imperious hand out for the bag. He sets it on her upturned palm and sinks on to the not entirely steady stool. She unfolds the top of and peers inside. Her eyelids flutter as she inhales the yeasty almond scent, but she delays gratification to glare at him again.

She clears her throat and holds out her hand again. He passes the book to her, and when she flips to the title page to look for the inscription, his mind goes blank with panic. He knows he wrote something. He knows that as of ten minutes ago, he thought it was damned near perfect. As of ten seconds ago, he’s convinced that it’s trash or nonsense or something else that’s about to get him killed. But it satisfies her, whatever it is. She gives him a curt nod and lays the book aside and turns her attention back to the bakery bag.

“Talk,” she says, tearing off a piece of bear claw and popping it into her mouth. 

“Talk,” he repeats dumbly, and it’s no feigned demurral. He’s at a genuine loss with everything he meant to talk his way around crowding into his mouth at once, and absolutely nothing coming out. Almost nothing. “About Beckett.” Lanie raises her eyebrows. It’s the only lifeline he’ll get. “There’s a guy. Josh.”

“And that’s your business?” Her tone doesn’t match the words. It’s more an invitation than the challenge it should sound like.

“It’s not,” he mumbles, staring down at his own hands. “I just didn’t know.”

“Me neither,” she admits, but something tells him that’s not quite the whole truth. She gives him a narrow-eyed look, but adds. “Didn’t know anything came of it.”

“Came of it?” He wishes it were a more elegant question. He wishes he had the wherewithal to talk his way around to it, but he doesn’t.

“I took her out for a drink after the whole thing with Royce.” She shoots him a look that’s significantly less kind than anything since he stumbled into the morgue. He wonders about it in a helpless, pained way, He wonders what he could’ve done, should’ve done, what anyone expected him to do, but mostly he’s rapt, fixated on what she’ll say next. “Got tired of taking no for an answer all summer.”

“Summer,” he says not quite under his breath. It’s another blow, even though it’s really nothing more than confirmation of what he knows already. “All summer?”

“Went to the ladies,” she goes on loudly enough to let him know she definitely heard him. “Come back, and there’s tall, dark, and handsome slipping Beckett his number.”

“So, she called him,” he says. He sounds desperate, even to his own ears. “But she didn’t tell you. She didn’t tell anyone.” 

“So she didn’t.” Lanie waves it off and digs into another piece of bear claw. “It’s Beckett. So?”

“So?” He repeats. “So she would’ve if …”

He trails off. He doesn’t know what to say, though he knows what he wants to believe. What he doesn’t want to believe. She didn’t tell anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the length.


	5. Mejor—Anatomy of a Murder (3 x 05)

> _“We have to look at these like a romance novel.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Anatomy of a Murder (3 x 05)_
> 
> * * *

He’s sitting in her desk chair. She’s been gone thirty seconds, establishing with the uniform handling Manuel Calderón’s paperwork that she did, in fact, sign on every necessary dotted line. She comes back, and he’s sitting in her chair, so absorbed in whatever he’s doing that he totally misses her looming over his shoulder. He totally misses the pointed throat clearing and the tap of her foot.

“Castle!” she snaps when it’s clear that he’ll go on totally missing every single subtle hint.

“Beckett!” He jerks upright so quickly that it sends him rolling backward on a near collision course with her. It swings him around and gives her an unobstructed view of the desk. Her desk, which is, for some godforsaken reason, dotted with post-notes. There’s one on the blotter, the stapler, the elephants, the desk itself.

She snatches that one. It’s closer to her and bigger than the rest of them. _Escritorio_ , it says in hasty ballpoint caps. She closes her eyes. She holds the note up to him. “Why?”

“Calderón was right,” he says. He sweeps his hand in a theatrical arc toward the other labels with all the flair of a gameshow model. “Everything really is better in Spanish.”

He has an absolute mania for it after that. He erases her notes on the board and rewrites them in pidgin Spanish he cobbles together on the fly with his phone and promiscuous array of online translators. When she points out that she can throw him out the window and every single person on the fourth floor will swear that he jumped, he whispers _fuera de la ventana_ under his breath. He tries parentheticals underneath everything she writes, but only once. He seems to get that she really might murder him for it and he backs away from the board entirely, after that.

He writes _amor_ in Sharpie across the knuckles of one hand, and _odio_ across the other. He flashes them at her the minute she’s about to start an interrogation and somehow manages to fold his hands demurely to hide the letters through the rest of the interview. She punches him good and hard right on the biceps for that, but she can’t stop laughing about it, honestly.

Post-its remain his favorite medium. She’s not sure how he doesn’t deplete homicide’s entire supply within the first few days. She has her suspicions about clandestine deliveries and bakery-based bribes for certain civilian employees, but she hasn’t caught him yet. She’s never once catches him. The whole floor is like _Sesame Street:_ The bullpen, the break room and everything in it. When she looks up into the locker room mirror and sees _espejo_ blocking out the lower part of her face, pretty much everyone on the floor is in for some stern questions.

Mostly, he acts locally, though. He’s all innocence when she finds _plato de dulces_ at the bottom of her candy dish. It’s a satisfied smirk when she finally finds the neat little roll tucked into the jaws of her staple remover: _quitagrapas_. The elephants get luchador names rolled up and tucked into their trunks, and she has to snatch off the large format ones he tacks to Esposito and Ryan’s backs— _hijo favorito_ and _segundo hijo favorito,_ respectively—before the boys see them. He knows enough to run before she can collar him for those particular crimes and misdemeanors.

She never catches him in the act, though. He throws her off by being shifty all the time. He sits or stands or shoves a Sharpie in his pocket just as she rounds the corner or steps into line of sight of the desk from the break room. He watches her rifle through her desk drawers and turn over every last object within reach and asks, with a studied, casual air, _Looking for something, Detectiva?_ He gets punched hard, right on the biceps, a lot.

She’s inured to it by the time she catches—“catches”—him skulking around the big bottom drawer of her desk. It hardly even strikes her as weird when his head suddenly pops into view and he drops hard into his chair with a slightly panicked expression on his face. She looks around, expecting to see the file cabinets, the fax machine, or every last uniform and plainclothes detective tagged or something. But what she sees is Josh strolling out of the elevator with his helmet tucked under his arm.

“Hey,” she says with a little more enthusiasm than necessary. A lit tells less confusion and annoyance than she feels. She was supposed to pick him up. “Close by again?”

“Close by,” he says with a smile and a surreptitious squeeze of her hand. “You two still working?” He lifts his chin toward Castle, and the two of them exchange stiff nods.

“No, I’m good to go.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder at the desk. “Let me just get my stuff.”

Josh stays where he is, for which she’s eternally grateful. Castle flicks her a helpless look. He obviously has something to say, but between her glare and Josh looming in the distance, he can’t quite manage anything but a faint, “Until tomorrow, _Detectiva.”_

“Night, Castle,” she replies brusquely as she hauls her bag on to her shoulder and slips the straps of her helmet over her wrist.

Josh catches what turns out to be the last post-it as he pulls her hair free of the high collar of her leather jacket once she has her helmet situated. She doesn’t know it’s the last, of course. Not then, but the yellow square tries to flutter away on a sudden breeze, but he catches it.

 _“Casco de moto de Nikki Fuego,”_ he reads, frowning down at the hasty ballpoint caps. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.” She plucks it from his fingers and shoves it deep into the pocket of her jeans. “Just a stupid Castle thing.”

She climbs on to her bike. Her brain reflexively translates: _Cosa estúpida del Castillo._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yikes. Sorry. Another long one. 


	6. Sentry—3XK (3 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s an eternal night. The sense of stillness that settles over him as the two of them sit silently by the neglected motel pool gives the illusion that it’s done. It’s not, though.

> _“I’m actually talking about a more intimate interaction.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, 3XK (3 x 06)_
> 
> * * *

It’s an eternal night. The sense of stillness that settles over him as the two of them sit silently by the neglected motel pool gives the illusion that it’s done. It’s not, though. There’s a host of people who want a piece of him, at the scene and back at the precinct, and the night is eternal.

She looks out for him, though. Someone too important to be at the scene himself sends an indentured toady to snap him up, and she stares the officious little twit down. She makes it clear in no uncertain terms that she’ll be the one to take him back to the precinct, and he’s grateful for it. He buckles himself in and sags against the door and he’s grateful.

She talks to him on the way. She fills the silence with a crash course on the intimidating titles of everyone who’ll be waiting.

“Some of them were on the original task force,” she says. “Some got passed over then and they’re horning their way in now.”

“A task force,” he repeats with a heavy tongue.

She tries for a smile. “Guess it’s the big time for you, Castle.”

“Hold your applause,” he says, and his smile is just as far from what it should be as hers is.

She steadies him as the elevator doors bump open on the fourth floor and the promised host of strangers descends. Half a dozen Mr. Castles swirl around him. Half a dozen hands try to usher him in half a dozen different directions. It’s an out-of-body thing for him. He feels like every skittish witness they’ve ever interviewed. Every shell-shocked survivor who can barely put a sentence together, but her fingers land lightly on his elbow and the simple point of connection steadies him.

She waits for him. It’s hours—hours—after someone finally emerges victorious from the scrum, and person after person after person takes possession of him. It’s hours of saying the same pathetic few things over and over, but she waits for him.

He doesn’t realize that’s what’s happened at first. The last of the lackeys releases him back into the wild, and he drifts to her desk. She’s on her feet by the time he gets there. She has her keys in one hand and his coat in the other. He doesn’t remember how she wound up with it. He doesn’t remember so much of this.

“Come on, Castle.” She pushes the coat into his hands.

“Don’t you …?” He trails off. He looks around at the still-frenetic scene. It’s an all-star cast of strangers in severe suits falling in the sharpest lines he’s ever seen.

She shakes her head. “Nothing for me to do right now.” She herds him back toward the elevator and reaches past him to stab at the down button when it’s clear he can’t remember how anything works. “Let’s get you home.”

She doesn’t talk this time. Neither of them talks as she winds through the pre-dawn traffic, and they’re left with persistent silence as she rolls to a stop beneath a streetlight just winking out in front of his building. It’s a bit of scenic punctuation, another illusion that it’s over.

“Thank you,” he says at last, because he has to say something. It’s an eternal night, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to go on somehow.

“For what?” she asks.

He doesn’t know what to say at first. Or, really, he doesn’t know how to say it, then he does. Suddenly he knows exactly how. “For taking care of me.”


	7. Backfire—Almost Famous (3 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bringing him had seemed like a good idea back at the precinct.

> _“Treating him like a piece of meat.”_  
>  _—Javier Esposito, Almost Famous (3 x 07)_
> 
> * * *

Bringing him had seemed like a good idea back at the precinct. The next logical step in the investigation was to flush out their Fabio of Interest, and with a sly smile making its way around the horn—from her to Esposito, to Ryan, and back again—it had seemed like a a great idea to drag him along for a little undercover work and recreational torture.

It wasn’t a good idea, though. She’s learned that painful lesson several times over before they even make it into The Package Store.

The rowdy queue in the alley behind the club is made up of a handful of well-defined types, and every single type finds him absolutely fascinating. College girls, with no doubt highly suspect IDs, tug at the hems of their micro-mini skirts and shiver in the cold. They bend their heads together, whispering and giggling. They peek over their shoulders and send tiny waves his way, along with what they probably mean to be lascivious looks.

“Shouldn’t they be studying for midterms?” he grumbles for her benefit, even as he grins and waves back.

Before she can answer back, a hand comes out of nowhere to land on his shoulder and spin him around. An unsteady bachelorette has materialized. Her tiara slides further askew than it already is as her gaggle of bridesmaids pushes her forward.

“Suck for a buck!” they chant in unison. One lofts a fist full of singles overhead.

“Suck for a buck!” The bride-to-be slurs as she rolls her shoulders back. There’s a staggered array of lifesavers stitched loosely around the slogan across her chest. The cheap t-shirt is already sticky and rainbow stained from the who knows how many mouths that have come before. “Gotta suck!”

“I’m … um …” He backpedals. He shoots a desperate look over his shoulder that she pretends not to notice. “Sorry,” he says, fending the woman off at last with the full length of his arm. “Trying to cut back.”

By the time one of the suburban soccer moms approaches, Kate is weighing the wisdom of shoving him in a cab or at the very least making him wait in the car. The command is on her lips, but the woman has already detached herself from the huddle that’s definitely about him. She’s already putting one chunk-heeled, open-toed bootie in front of the other in a runway strut.

“Excuse me, aren’t you …” The obvious end of that sentence is lost in his ear as the woman slides a palm over his chest up to his shoulder to go on tiptoe.

She figures it’s game over on this stupid, bad idea, totally-not-undercover undercover operation at that point. Her hand goes to the small of her back where her shield is clipped out of sight beneath the hem of her lacy top. She grits her teeth and calculates how much of a pain in the ass it’ll be if she flashes it and shuts the place down for the hundred and one violations she’s absolutely sure she’ll find.

He manages to extricate himself before she can pull the trigger on Plan B, though. He manages to send the woman off with nothing more than a slightly disappointed shrug and a last look over her shoulder.

“Is it just me,” he says as he wanders back to her side, “or is this a really weird place for a book club meeting?”

She doesn’t answer. She turns her wrist up for the bouncer’s stamp and doesn’t say a word. This was so not a good idea.

images via homeofthenutty


	8. Equipped—Murder Most Fowl (3 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He exits the loft, full speed ahead. He feels the barest twinge of guilt for abandoning Alexis in the middle of her rodent-based crisis, but he’s honestly happy enough to have the two-ply drama of his mother and the frantic search for their guest rat behind him. He’s happier still to have a lead. Or a lead on a lead, at least.

> “Why you? What’s so special that they need you?”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Murder Most Fowl (3 x 08)

* * *

He exits the loft, full speed ahead. He feels the barest twinge of guilt for abandoning Alexis in the middle of her rodent-based crisis, but he’s honestly happy enough to have the two-ply drama of his mother and the frantic search for their guest rat behind him. He’s happier still to have a lead. Or a lead on a lead, at least.

He glowers at his phone as he hurries down the stairs. There’s no signal in the cavernous stairwell, and he’s annoyed that his call to Beckett will have to wait. He’s intent on luring her out into some sunlight and fresh air, and to do that he needs to dangle the lead in front of of her before she gets bogged down in something boring and sends Ryan and Esposito after the camera he’s all but certain Lightbulb Len would have left behind.

He hits the lobby at last. He spins out the door of his building with the briefest of waves to the night doorman. The fact that Eugene is more than half asleep is his first clue that there’s something he should be taking note of. His second is the weird gray light and the fact that Broome is all but empty.

He’s convinced for a split second that it’s the zombie apocalypse. His head swings back and forth in search of cars at forty-five degree angles to the curb with their doors hanging open, and empty intersections with their traffic lights flicking inexorably through their cycles, but there’s just the odd cyclist, a couple of joggers, and a cab stuck at the long light two streets up. It’s not the zombie apocalypse, it’s just early. Really early, and he tends to be heading in, not out, at this hour.

He hesitates with his phone in his hand. He likes the idea of being the one to call her first thing, but it might be too early. The thought comes and goes. It’s Beckett, he reminds himself. If she went home at all, she’s probably knocked off an ultra-marathon already this morning. He calls up her contact and hesitates again with his thumb hovering over the number. If she went home at all, she might not be alone. She might be with Josh.

He keeps forgetting about the guy, and maybe that’s wishful thinking. Okay, it’s at least part wishful thinking, but she pretty much never talks about him. Days—weeks—go by, and she never once mentions him. And then he’s just there. His stupid long face pops up on her phone, or worse, he makes an unannounced appearance at the precinct at the end of the day.

That’s all bad enough for reasons he doesn’t care to examine in the zombie apocalypse hours of the morning. It’s all bad enough given that he’s not always alone when she calls first thing and that … should probably be the more relevant variable.

But he really doesn’t relish the idea of Josh murmuring Who is it? from the other side of the bed or Josh picking up and answering Detective Beckett’s phone because she’s in the shower. He doesn’t relish Josh existing in the context of her zombie apocalypse hours of the morning at all, but he has a lead. He grits his teeth and brings his thumb down on the number.

She’s alone, though. At least he infers she’s alone from the fact that she mumble swears at him for a while, and she doesn’t seem to be worried about keeping her volume in check. He thinks she’s alone, because she says she’ll be at the park in thirty minutes to murder him in person if his lead isn’t worth it.

She makes good on it. She’s there in just a little less than thirty minutes, which just so happens to coincide with him shoving a tip in the jar at the coffee truck. He blunders up to her, talking a mile a minute at his own peril, but he can’t help it. He’s excited to see her in sunlight and fresh air, with no body, no Lanie, no Ryan and Esposito around.

She’s decidedly less excited to see him. It’s kind of adorable right up to the point that she says the magic murder phrase: Oh, geez, Castle, I haven’t even had my coffee yet.

  
It’s scary for a second. It’s zombie apocalypse terrifying until he remembers he’s holding her cup and Josh, wherever he is first thing this morning, isn’t.


	9. Cover Up—Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind (3 x 09)

> _“What self respecting espionage agent would act strangely and risk blowing her cover?”  
>  —Richard Castle, Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind (3 x 09)_
> 
> * * *

She spends an inordinate amount of time getting ready that morning. It’s stupid. She’s got a lead on tangible, definitely-of-this-world evidence. She’s got an appointment with someone who, in all likelihood, has it in his possession, and here she is dithering in front of the Cheval mirror in the bedroom. Here she is gripping the sink and leaning far over to the side to study the round, lurid mark a few inches below her ear in the swung-open mirror of the bathroom medicine cabinet.

She contemplates the array of silk scarves she hardly remembers hanging on to when she bundled up the salvageable remains of her wardrobe for the dry cleaner after the explosion. She drifts back to the bathroom again and picks up and puts down the bottle of foundation, the round compact, the brushes and sponges and puffs. She wonders if any combination—any technique—will work better now than it did a million years ago when she last had to cope with this particular problem.

She spends an inordinate amount of time on a to-and-fro dance before she lands on the simplest solution: A grey mock turtleneck paired with black pants. It’s simple, it’s seasonally appropriate, and it gets the job done, calling a minimum of attention to itself. There’s absolutely no reason she should feel weird about it. There’s absolutely no call for the unsettled flutter in her stomach or the fact that she’s solved the damned problem and she’s still inclined to linger. She’s still inclined to dither in front of the Cheval mirror with her hand skimming over the close-fitting fabric over the round, lurid mark.

She’s very nearly late for the appointment with Ted Carter. She covers the ground between the subway and the precinct at something close to a trot, and she still has to scramble to ditch her coat and bag before anyone notices that she’s very nearly late.

“Hey Beckett.” Ryan swings by her desk on the way to his own. He’s shrugging out of his coat in no particular hurry. “Ex-boyfriend’s signing in downstairs. Should be up in a few minutes.”

Esposito converges with his partner. “Better hope there’s something in that box of junk.” He brandishes a sheet of paper with a handful of names on it. “Looks like there’s not a lot of people other than the ex she she might’ve handed something off to.”

“Fine,” she says. “Get on them, just in case.”

Her tone is aggressively short. A blush creeps upward from her collar bones to her temples. It’s scratchy and hot and stupid under the close-fitting fabric of the turtleneck. She turns her back on the two of them. She can feel their confused looks pressing between her shoulder blades, propelling her toward the elevator.

She straightens her spine as the up arrow illuminates and the bell dings. She runs through her options for how to play things with Ted Carter—empathetic, combative, leading—but the doors roll open and it’s not Ted Carter, it’s him. It’s Castle, and her whole, stupid morning suddenly makes sense.

“Turtleneck,” he says with an approving nod.

The elevator rolls closed behind him. She dips her chin to take the edge off the grin that spreads across her face as the tension bleeds out of her.

“Turtleneck,” she admits. She sneaks a narrow-eyed glance at him. She sizes him up. “Makeup?”

“Makeup by Alexis,” he says with an exaggerated scowl. “I declined to ask why it is that my daughter has expertise in this area.”

“Wise move, Castle.”


	10. Present Company—Last Call (3 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s really glad she came along tonight. From the minute she belts out her line of the song to this moment, right here, with the five of them sipping scotch and swapping memories, ghost stories, tall tales, he’s really glad she came along, and not in the obvious ways. Not just in the obvious ways.

> _“Take a trip with me, to a simple yet dangerous time.”_
> 
> _—Richard Castle, Last Call (3 x 10)_
> 
> * * *

****He’s really glad she came along tonight. From the minute she belts out her line of the song to this moment, right here, with the five of them sipping scotch and swapping memories, ghost stories, tall tales, he’s really glad she came along, and not in the obvious ways. Not just in the obvious ways.

He’s pettily glad in his heart of hearts that the fact that she’s here means she’s definitely not tucked in with Josh and a laptop and “research.” He’s adolescently glad to the point of smug over it, and the fact that she’s here and she’s popped another button literally and metaphorically is almost icing on the cake. He’s glad that she’s daring and flirty and wicked-tongued, and evidence accumulated over the course of the evening indicates that it’s him she most likes crossing swords with.

He’s really glad she’s here, and there’s a part of him that fantasizes about the others making their excuses one by one while she nurses the last of her dram, so that it’s down to him and her. There’s a part of him that fills in the fantasy with innocent and not-so-innocent touches and something romantic on the piano. There’s a part of him that yearns for things it shouldn’t, because he … because she … and yet …

It’s not the largest part of him tonight, though—the part that yearns. Tonight, the largest part of him, by far, is better than content to have things as they are. He’s glad of Montgomery, the patriarch, with his back-in-the-day grumbling and the warning looks he always has ready.

He’s glad of Ryan and Esposito and brotherhood, even when it means a double dose of warning looks headed his way. Even if he swears that he and Beckett would be on their second kid by now if it weren’t for that duo’s preternatural ability to sniff out significant moments.

And he’s grateful not just for the sparks that fly between the two of them—between him and Kate—he’s grateful tonight for the fact that they shine all the brighter for the laughter they provoke. He’s grateful that, warning looks or not, the others pound the table and hold their sides and goad them on.

He’s inclined to romanticize the past. He knows that. He loves secret stashes and passageways and narrow escapes into wholly forgotten parts of the city. He misses tying his daughter’s shoes and aches a little every day because his first love is long behind him.

He dreams up grandiloquent futures. He imagines Alexis achieving preposterous things single-handedly, and sees himself winning the Nobel Prize for literature. He lies awake far more often than he should, in circumstances where he absolutely shouldn’t, fantasizing about the possibilities inherent in an evening just like this, when it comes down to just him and just her.

But for all that, he’s glad—truly glad—of the present. He’s glad of this family gathered around this table.


	11. Unraveled—Nikki Heat (3 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She strips off her work clothes with more vehemence than she really cares to examine. The heels go first. She kicks them to the back of the closet, then pauses. Her natural inclination toward neatness, order, discipline wars with the petty, aggravated feeling she hasn’t quiet shaken yet.

> _“Let’s just say, I’m not afraid to go deep to find out who someone really is.”  
>  —Duke Jones, Nikki Heat (3 x 11)_

* * *

She strips off her work clothes with more vehemence than she really cares to examine. The heels go first. She kicks them to the back of the closet, then pauses. Her natural inclination toward neatness, order, discipline wars with the petty, aggravated feeling she hasn’t quiet shaken yet.

Petty and aggravated wins. She leaves the shoes lying there at crime-scene angles against the wall. She peels her jeans down her legs and hauls the v-neck shirt over her head. She stuffs them both, along with socks, underwear, bra, deep into the hamper and slams the lid on all of it.

Her costume.

That’s what it is, and it’s not as if she didn’t know that. As she steps into her flannel, drawstring pants and pulls on a soft, worn sweatshirt, she reminds herself that of course she knows it’s a costume. What she wears to work, who she is on the job, it’s a persona, complete with signature wardrobe pieces, and she’s just had enough of it for one day, two days, however long Natalie Rhodes has been pulling her to pieces. She’s just had enough Nikki Heat for a while.

That’s what she thinks—what she says to herself out loud—as she tosses her cast off leather motorcycle jacket from the couch to the floor and prepares to hurl herself down. She prepares to sprawl and stretch and slouch put as much distance between herself and Nikki as possible.

That’s not how it goes, though. She looks at the couch for a longing second, then drifts to the bookshelf. She runs her fingers along the spines of one section, then the next, then the next, but she knows—knows—where this ends up.

She runs her fingers along the spines with his name. The Derrick Storms. The few one-off novels. Those are all her mom’s. They’re smoke damaged water-logged, though that’s mostly from her mother’s love of reading in the tub. The scent of lavender bubble bath is almost certainly imaginary at this point, but it’s no less potent for that.

She lingers on all those books and hopes for a moment that’s what she’s after. She hopes for a moment that it’s a connection to her mom she needs to snap her out of the frustration and discontent of not knowing where she begins and the persona ends. But that’s not it. It’s not Derrick Storm. It’s not _Death of a Prom Queen_ or _When it Comes to Slaughter_ that she’s ultimately drawn to. It’s her books. Their books. It’s Nikki that she tugs free from the orderly line of spines set flush on the shelf.

She does sprawl then. She stretches and slouches and flops on her belly. She lays Naked Heat aside for now and props Heat Wave on a pillow a few inches in front of her nose. She props her chin on the backs of her hands. She flips through the good parts, where he gets her sense of humor—her dry, wicked sarcasm, yes, but her silliness too. He captures her flash points almost too well, and he parcels those out between Nikki and Rook. He lets his own avatar take on the rage when Nikki has to keep her cool, and it’s more relief than a stupid mystery novel should afford.

He writes into the spaces between the things she does and why she does them in a way that infuriates her and terrifies her and makes her feel like the whole world is rooting through her underwear drawer. But it also makes her feel … known. He writes into the moments the two of them have never quite had. The moments they’ve missed entirely or dipped their toes into, only to get completely derailed by Ryan or Esposito or their own stupidity and rotten fucking timing. He plays them out with lovely things said and unsaid between Rook and Nikki.

It’s fiction. It’s fantasy well beyond the predictably placed, blush-inducing sex scenes. It’s a version of her that sees right through the persona, and sprawled out on the couch with his words on the page in front of her, she knows where she begins and ends.


	12. Fulcrum—Poof! You’re Dead (3 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their food truck date is anything but momentous. It’s strange, but true. It is for him, anyway. It’s strange, but true, and he’s pretty sure it’s the same for her.

> _“So what do we do now?”  
>  —Richard Castle, Poof! You’re Dead (3 x 12)_
> 
> * * *

Their food truck date is anything but momentous. It’s strange, but true. It is for him, anyway. It’s strange, but true, and he’s pretty sure it’s the same for her.

She almost doesn’t ask. Her back is turned and she’s pointed toward the stairs. That’s long-established shorthand between them. She takes the stairs when she needs or wants or thinks she ought to be alone. He doesn’t know which column it falls into tonight—need, want, ought to be, or all three at once—he just knows she almost doesn’t ask.

You wanna come?

He almost says no when she does. He thinks she knows that, too. For all the giddy enthusiasm he calls up right away, for all that he poses it as an impossibility—How could I say no?—he thinks she knows he’s on the verge of saying just that.

But she asks, and he doesn’t say no. It’s a date, and it’s anything but momentous.

It’s mundane, and that’s reassuring in a difficult, roundabout way. It’s cantankerous and flirty and typical of them. It’s friendly, and that seems important. It is important, because he thinks they both forget sometimes. He thinks that with all the competing truths about what they are—with everything they seem constantly on the verge of being—they’re both prone to losing sight of the fact that they’re friends.

But that’s what they are tonight, first and foremost, and it feels right that it’s anything but momentous.

She picks fights with him as they stamp their feet in the cold of the long, winding line. She deliberately provokes him about what food does and doesn’t go with what other food. She needles him about who’ll pay if they ever actually get to the front of the damned line. She bumps his shoulder hard when he’s too much into his own head to keep up his end of the conversation, and he rises to the occasion.

He spins outlandish theories about where Lanie and Esposito are. He swears they’re off exploring the merits of slippery versus sticky; they’re on the verge of simultaneously murdering one another; they’re halfway to a drive-through wedding chapel in the Poconos. He offers up a list of first dance songs for Kevin and Jenny, each one more disgustingly cute than the last.

They settle on a bench with their shared feast and the conversation rises and falls as it will. She gives in when he insists and talks about her grandfather between bites of biscuit. He gives in when she says fair is fair and tells her about all the stupid things he got up to with whoopee cushions and fake vomit when he was young and pimply and awkward.

It’s easy. It’s companionable and anything but momentous, even when it’s late enough—when they’re both cold enough—that they know it has to come to an end.

“You okay, Castle?”

It strikes him that it’s the second time in as many days that she’s asked him that. It strikes her, too. He can see that in the way her gaze drops to the sidewalk between them, then climbs back up to meet his. She’s worried she might have ruined this by asking. He’s worried his answer might ruin it still.

There’s so much bound up in the question. There’s the fact that she—Kate—both is and isn’t the reason he finally answered Gina’s call. There’s the fact that the two of them are friends, whatever else they are, have been, or might one day be. There’s the fact that he and Gina aren’t, weren’t, have never been, and that’s a truth that’s neither kind nor helpful right now.

There are so many things he might say that would turn this little while they’ve spent together into something it shouldn’t be. Something it’s not the time for.

“I’m not,” he says simply. “But I’m better than I was.”

He holds up the silly bouquet of silk flowers. He laughs and she laughs. The warm puff of her breath curls around the warm puff of his. The cloud dissipates, and they part ways.

“Night, Castle.”

“Until tomorrow, Detective.”

They part as friends. It’s anything but momentous.


	13. Offering—Knockdown (3 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was bright sun the last time she came.

> _“A lot’s happened since then.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Knockdown (3 x 13)_

* * *

It was bright sun the last time she came. Cold like this, but bright sun, and she’s grateful for the cloud cover today. She’s grateful for the way it presses down on the world and hides the city from view. The fog twines around everything to hide everything here at ground level, her ankles and the winter-blackened trunks of trees. The gravestones and monuments and low wrought-iron fences that encircle here-and-there stretches of low evergreens. It hides them all, and that feels like a mercy.

She’s grateful for the illusion of privacy, because this is hard. Because she’s no better at this now than she was six months ago when she started coming here again. She’s no better at it than she was eight, seven, six years ago when the times in between stretched out to nothing. To almost nothing. She’s always come on the anniversary.

It was bright sun then. Just a couple of weeks ago, and that’s hard to believe. She looks to her left, to her right. She narrows her eyes as though she’ll be able to see through the fog like that. As if she’ll be able to tell if the bouquets of wine-dark winter roses are still there. If the propped-up picture frames and cheap teddy bears have made it most of the way through a particularly brutal January. She can’t tell, of course. She can’t see anything from here, even though the stones crowd close around her mother’s from all sides.

She’s never brought anything herself. She’s never seen the point of such offerings—dying things for the dead. She knows she’s no good at this, but she’s never seen the point. So she stands, empty-handed like always, and talks to her mom in halting syllables.

She tells her about Lockwood, and the tears come. Frustration and grief and anger tumble out of her mouth, because Lockwood is another Coonan. He’s another lackey, and for all her bravado at the prison, she knows he’ll never break.

She tells her about Raglan. That he was dying. That he’s dead—murdered by the hand he served—and she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feel about that. She only knows how she does feel. She only knows it’s left something black and boiling deep inside her.

She tries to tell her mom all of it, but her throat closes. Unthinking, she strips off one glove, then the other. She rakes at the tiny cuts peppering the back of her hand where minute shards of ceramic sliced into her skin. She swipes at her cheeks and whispers Sorry. Sorry.

It’s a long while before she can manage anything more than that. It’s long enough that her fingers are stiff with cold and her scarf is sodden with the thick, heavy snowflakes that fall steadily now.

“I’m gonna go, Mom,” she says finally. “I’ll come”—her breath hitches painfully—“I’ll come back week after next for your birthday, okay?” She gathers herself up. “I’ll think of something good to tell you by then. Something that’s not … not just this.”

Sorry, she whispers one last time as she turns to go. She picks her way through the dense forest of stones. She navigates by the winter-blackened trunks and low wrought-iron fences, but she doesn’t make it far. Not far at all before she turns back. She sets off at a clumsy run and nearly goes to her knees as she twists her way around the last corner.

“He kissed me, Mom. Castle.” She hardly needs to clarify. Her chin drops. She feels a blush creep into her cheeks despite the cold as she realizes it, but she hardly needs to clarify. “I kissed him, and it was … it was just a dumb idea, because … we needed …” She shakes her head. “I don’t know if it counts.” She’s laughing and crying and tired. She’s abruptly so tired. She lays a hand on the rough-hewn surface of the gravestone’s curved top. She sweeps her thumb along the contrasting polish of its front. “I don’t know. We’ll talk about it next time, okay? Maybe … maybe you can help me figure it out.”


	14. Hazard—Lucky Stiff (3 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His feelings about Operation We’re-Gonna-Need-Your-Ferrari shouldn’t be nearly as mixed as they seem to be. Beckett, in a form-fitting dress so short it’s practically a rumor, has just informed him in her very best interrogation room voice that she’ll be the one sliding behind the wheel of his Ferrari.

> _“A little birdie told me all about you.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Lucky Stiff (3 x14)_

* * *

His feelings about _Operation We’re-Gonna-Need-Your-Ferrari_ shouldn’t be nearly as mixed as they seem to be. Beckett, in a form-fitting dress so short it’s practically a rumor, has just informed him in her very best interrogation room voice that she’ll be the one sliding behind the wheel of his Ferrari.

His feelings about her part of the equation certainly aren’t mixed. They’re complicated and multifaceted and ethically questionable, given that she’s still—apparently and unfortunately—attached to _Doctor I-Save-Lives-Before-Breakfast-and-Save-The-World-Just-in-Time-for-Elevenses,_ but as he follows the sway of her hips and the sharp clack of her stilettos through his building’s underground parking garage, his feelings for her are emphatically unmixed.

It’s the car. It’s the damned Ferrari that’s the problem.

She heads to the wrong one. That’s excruciating in and of itself, the fact that there are two sitting beneath his shi-shi SoHo loft is cringe-worthy in context. But it’s worse than that. It’s about to worse than that.

“Uh, Beckett,” he calls out before she can round the hood and head for the driver’s side door. “That’s not … um … mine is over there,” he finishes with a miserable gesture a few cars down the row.

It takes her a second. She stands practically at the bumper of the first car—older by several years—and pivots on the toe of one platform, peep-toe pump to take in the second.

“That …”

She takes a few quick steps in the direction of the evidence against him. She drops into investigative mode, and if it were possible for his feelings about Undercover Beckett to get less mixed, they would.

“This …”

She circles the stupid red beast in a slow strut. Her fingers hover just over the high back end. They trace the long outline of the driver’s side, the road-hugging downward curve of the front quarter panel. She stops dead center in front and leans in close to take in the details of the headlights, the logo.

“This is new,” she says finally. She stands tall. She peers at him across the length of the car.

He’s apparently drifted along in her wake and taken up a post at the rear bumper.

“Last year,” he says, answering the question she’s really asking. The one that has the wheels in her head turning. “Last summer,” he adds, answering it whole.

Pain flits across her features, and he knows she hears the echo of her own voice as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of her DIY murder board. He knows she understands that this is an admission in kind on his part. It’s a confession he’s trying to make about where he was—who he was—when they parted ways.

She gets some of it, though he doubts she remembers her own offhand comment about midlife crises—about Ferraris and new girlfriends. He doubts she understands why he kind of hates this fucking car right now, even though the thought of her sliding behind the wheel in that dress absolutely dismantles him.

“So,” she says with a rueful smile. “I guess your inner child didn’t go quietly, huh?”

He does his level best to match it—the smile and the attempt at a light-hearted tone—but he winds up staring at the GTO on the back bumper. “Just when you think it’s safe.”

“Safe.”

She says it almost to herself, and he thinks maybe she does remember that offhand comment. He thinks maybe she’s just recognized his direct-from-factory meltdown is all its red, glaringly obvious glory, but when he lifts his head to see—to apologize or something—she’s turned inward. She’s grappling with something of her own, and then she isn’t. Then she’s shaking herself out of it and throwing her shoulders back as she raises the fob and pops the Ferrari’s locks. She’s regarding the car with an absolutely lascivious look that leaves him having to steady himself with a palm on its high back end.

She slinks around to the driver’s side door and pours herself into the seat, long legs flashing. “Sometimes safe is overrated, Castle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Forgive me my artistic license here. Castle’s Ferrari is NOT new as of February 2011; however, I can’t get over Beckett’s line in “A Deadly Game” or the fact that no one seems to know that Castle owns one until this episode. 


	15. Occasional—The Final Nail (3 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a perfectly nice evening. It’s kind of a problem.

> _“I didn’t realize that the two of you were a couple.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, The Final Nail (3 x 15)_
> 
> * * *

Josh is understanding about the fact that she’s running late. He’s waiting for her at the restaurant—the lovely, not-too-much restaurant—he’d managed to swing a last-minute reservation at. She rushes in, breathless, and strides ahead of the hostess, and he stands with a smile when she reaches the table. He kisses her cheek and short circuits the string of apologies she tries to make.

 _You’re here now,_ he says amicably.

He tells her she looks amazing. That’s … generous, and she knows it. A single glance around at women in sequins, women in striking little black dresses, women in things that are new, daring, and decidedly special occasion tells her she doesn’t measure up.

She’d meant to get something new, or at least to make sure something fancier that usually lives at the back of the closet was presentable enough for tonight, but with everything—with Damian Westlake and Castle’s devastation and everything—she’d wound up with a pencil skirt and silk blouse. Other than the skirt, the difference between work and this is more or less a button or two and a glimpse of a lacy camisole she’d forgotten she had. It’s a heavier swipe of eyeliner and a darker shade of lipstick that she’d had to search for at the back of a bathroom drawer.

 _You always look amazing,_ he assures her when she demurs.

He’s up to the challenge of keeping the conversation going when she’s quiet at first. He tells her about his trip, what they were able to accomplish, and what they weren’t able to do this time around. He treads lightly in trying to coax her out of her own head. He steers away from work, from the case that he knows was especially hard, though he doesn’t know exactly why or how, and asks whether she’d managed to do much riding while he was away, if she’s still interested in seeing the Genzken exhibit at the New Museum.

 _If our schedules ever let up at the same time,_ he laughs and takes her hand across the table.

He picks a bottle of wine for them to share that makes the best of the haphazard things she’s chosen from the menu, and it’s wonderful.

It’s everything the hammer drop of cheap whisky she’d tossed back earlier wasn’t.

The restaurant is everything the surprisingly seedy bar she and Castle had stumbled across just a few blocks from Damian Westlake’s upscale row house wasn’t.

The conversation she finally manages to throw herself into by the time the first course arrives is light and entertaining and relaxing.It’s everything the side-by-side hour with Castle, listening and listening as miserable fragments of story rose up and out of him, wasn’t. And that’s kind of the problem.

She smiles at Josh in the candlelight. She clinks her glass against his. She enjoys the evening, and it’s clear—it’s absolutely obvious—that he does, too.

It’s a perfectly nice evening. It’s kind of a problem.


	16. The Conversation—Setup (3 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not just the end of the world that transforms him into a Man of Action. First of all, because she’s right like she almost always is, and it’s probably—almost certainly—not the end of the world. It’s probably not even the end of New York. Although, if it were the end of New York, he feels like that’s effectively the end of the world. But it’s probably—almost certainly—not.

> _“Carpe diem. Seize the day. Clearly, I didn’t teach that to my son.”  
>  —Martha Rodgers, Setup (3 x 16)_

* * *

It’s not just the end of the world that transforms him into a Man of Action. First of all, because she’s right like she almost always is, and it’s probably—almost certainly—not the end of the world. It’s probably not even the end of New York. Although, if it were the end of New York, he feels like that’s effectively the end of the world. But it’s probably—almost certainly—not.

Second of all, he’s not sure that being on the verge of uttering a long, jumbled string of long-overdue declarations qualifies him for Man of Action status. Man of Uttering status, maybe. If there were a record, though, he’d insist that it show he’s not at all averse to the idea of skipping the uttering and getting right to the action, especially given that this fucking plastic tent with its zip-up doors and windows is as close to a decently private place as the two of them are likely to get in a world where Ryan and Esposito exist.

Third of all, and finally, even without the (probably not) end of the world, he’s just … there. He’s just tired of the pretense and the way the two of them just get too much in their own heads. He’s tired of their lives being out of step because they’re stupid when it comes to each other, and he’s just there.

He’s sorted himself out over Gina. He’s applied the Beckett-o-Meter to that situation, and the answers, in order, are _Yes, No, Yes._

 _Yes,_ it’s true that if she hadn’t been poised to ride off blissfully into the sunset with Demming, he would never have meandered off bickering into the sunset with Gina. He would have never tried to … recalibrate his expectations.

 _No,_ he did not break up with Gina because of Beckett. He broke up with Gina because of Gina and because of him and because of them. He broke up with Gina because he couldn’t, can’t won’t recalibrate his expectations.

 _Yes,_ it’s the Beckett Standard that’s responsible for that, because he likes her. He’s infatuated with, attracted to, fascinated by, crazy about, problematically inclined to moon over, but most of all, he _likes_ her. He thinks she’s funny. He knows she’s smart. He admires her integrity and respects her work ethic. Her mind works in a way that’s fascinatingly at right angles to his, and it’s invigorating and exciting and maddening, and not for nothing, she is the best kisser, even when she’s thinking about how to concuss a thug the whole time. He likes her, and he thinks they’d be great together, because they’re already great together, and he is just so _done_ pretending otherwise.

So the end of the world is irrelevant to his Man of Action plan, and she doesn’t want to talk about it anyway, so he brings up Josh. Fucking Josh. The minute he does—the minute he opens his mouth and the hated name falls out—he realizes that he really would rather talk about the end of the world in grisly detail than talk about him. And the beauty of their white plastic Washington Heights paradise—the beauty of this (probably not) end-of-the-world moment—is that she looks like she feels exactly the same.

She’s looked like she’d rather talk about the end of the world than fucking Josh since before the obstacle himself showed up at the precinct, but then she does talk about him. She talks about the absence of him, and for a moment he’s paralyzed. He’s struck dumb. His heart hurts for her—for his friend and the messy, impossible situation she finds herself in—and it feels … unfair to say anything. It feels predatory to throw one more complicating factor at her. And it feels unwise to muddy the waters when it comes to what the two of them are. What they are definitely going to be.

But it’s the end of the world. Or it’s probably not, but it’s been nine months, and this is stupid. It’s been almost two years and he is so there.

He steels himself. He kicks the Man of Action and tells him to get the hell up off the floor. He gives the Man of Uttering such a pinch. He opens his mouth.

The sound of a zipper rends the air. Their white plastic Washington Heights paradise splits wide open. It’s not the end of the world. It just feels like it.


	17. Scene—Countdown (3 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Josh has decided that she is a priority.

> _“How long do you think we’re going to last dressed like this?”  
>  —Richard Castle, Countdown (3 x 17)_
> 
> * * *

Josh has decided that she is a priority. _Realized._ That’s the word he uses when they finally have a chance to talk. At the warehouse, in the back of the ambulance when she comes to, she’s confused. She hits out at him and asks where Castle is over and over. When she can finally focus—when she finally thinks to ask Josh what he’s doing there—he simply says he was on the plane, then he wasn’t. All the cryptic messages she’d left him were after the fact as far as his epiphany was concerned.

But she only knows that after he shows up at the precinct—after her own shamefaced realization that he’d have heard the news on the news, because she hadn’t called him. She hadn’t _thought_ to call him. But they go back to her place after he shows up. After Castle leaves on a not-so-cryptic note of his own, and Josh explains that he realized, just as they were about to close the doors on the plane and push back, that she’s a priority. He was on the plane, and then he wasn’t.

They’re sitting knee to knee on the edge of her couch. He’s holding both her hands, and his head is bowed low. She’s preoccupied with the visuals, like she’s watching the scene from outside herself, and it’s a little melodramatic—low lights and the two of them in profile. It’s a little stagey.

“I’m ashamed, Kate,” he tells her.

“Of what?” she asks. She has to work not to squirm. If anyone should be ashamed, she’s pretty sure it should be her, and she’s not even sure how deep that runs. She’s not sure what’s on her list of offenses, and it’s something she should have examined long before now.

“Signing on to another mission like that. And an open-ended one?” He shakes his head. “It’s not an excuse, but I’m not used to being with …” He trails off. His usual even-tempered confidence evaporates.

“Someone who makes you choose between them and saving the world?” She means it to lighten the mood, she supposes, but it falls flat. It sits at an odd angle to the things he’s trying to tell her.

“Kate, we both said things we wish we hadn’t.” He squeezes her hands. “You had every right to call me out for not even talking to you about it.”

“I did?”

It’s a dumb thing to say in context. It’s exactly the fight she picked with him. Exactly, but that’s kind of the point. She picked the fight because it had seemed like the kind of thing it she ought to be mad about, because it’s Will all over again. It’s the kind of thing that Lanie would tell her in slow, loud English that she has every right to be mad about. But she wasn’t mad, exactly, when she picked an it’s-the-priniciple-of-the-thing fight, and it’s strange that she has to … outsource that anger. It’s strange and probably telling that she needs an outside reference for what she’s feeling. What she ought to be feeling.

“I do?”

“Of course you do.” He lets go of one hand to tilt her chin up toward him, to bring their gazes level. “It’s not some either–or—you or saving the world—it’s about us figuring it out. It’s about priorities.”

“Us,” she says like she’s trying out some entirely foreign concept. It’s not far off the mark.

He smiles. She smiles back. She feels like she’s watching from outside herself. It’s a little melodramatic.


	18. Dig if You Will the Picture—One Life to Lose (3 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She texts him a picture of a picture—her signed Temptation Lane photo tacked up to a wall somewhere in her apartment.

> _“Wait, does that even qualify as cheating?”  
>  —Richard Castle, One Life to Lose (3 x 18)_
> 
> * * *

She texts him a picture of a picture—her signed _Temptation Lane_ photo tacked up to a wall somewhere in her apartment. It’s just a few hours after he gave it to her. He’s still at the Old Haunt with Ryan and Esposito, and she’s apparently doing some late-night interior decorating, courtesy of a gift he gave her, which suggests that phone call notwithstanding, she didn’t end up with Josh this evening.

It’s too tempting a state of affairs for him not to respond. He keeps the phone beneath the level of the table. He keeps half his mind on the easy back-and-forth with the boys and taps out a one-thumbed reply: _Looks good._ He’s about to leave it at that, but he realizes something. He sneaks a second look at the picture to confirm that the wall it’s on is unfamiliar, which means … Bedroom? _Flattered to be admitted to the Inner Sanctum,_ he adds and hits send before he can lose his nerve. Or come to his senses. _Whatever._

He knows it’s a calculated risk, but he’s still riding the high of her shy, sweet confession about her fondness for soap operas, or at least one of them. Besides, it’s highly unlikely she’ll drag all the way down here at this time of night just to twist his ear. It’s highly unlikely she’ll even dignify the tug on her pigtails with a reply. Just as the thought crosses his mind, the phone vibrates in his hand. The screen lights up again. It’s another picture of a picture. This time it’s jutting off the edge of a small table. There’s a waste basket beneath, and one of her hands is in the shot, holding a lit strike-anywhere match not quite to the glossy corner.

He laughs out loud. It gets him the stink eye from Ryan and Esposito, who were apparently deep into the kind of Real Talk that comes late at night on the heels of a couple of beers and a round of shots. He mumbles an apology—he makes some lame excuse about Alexis texting him cute dog pictures—that neither of them really listens to before they launch back into whatever it was they were talking about.

He’s on the outskirts of the current topic of conversation anyway, so he excuses himself. He manages a quick, mostly unobtrusive snap of his own picture hanging on the wall near the bar. He sends a two-thumbed message as he makes his way slowly to the gents: _Cutting off your nose to spite your face? BTW, it obviously needs a frame._ He follows the message with his own picture of a picture.

He expects silence again. He hopes for something, but he sets his expectations for silence. He pushes into the bathroom and spends a few _Mississippi_ s washing his hands to establish an alibi before he heads back to the table. His phone is stubbornly dark on the shelf above the sink. It’s stubbornly dark as he heads back through the bar to Ryan and Esposito, and it’s still stubbornly dark as he jumps back into the conversation, which has turned to Saturday morning cartoons for some reason neither one of them can articulate. They’re game to try, though, and it’s a distraction from the damned phone.

The two of them arguing about the _Laff-a-Lympics,_ with occasional rabble-rousing contributions from him, when the phone, trapped between his palm and thigh beneath the table, vibrates and lights up. The picture’s in a frame now, something she obviously hunted up and repurposed. It’s propped on the small table from the previous shot. He can definitely see now that it’s a nightstand. It’s her nightstand, right next to her bed.

Ryan interrupts his giddy little internal dance at the thought of something he gave her being so close to where she rests her head at night, and he has to mutter another excuse for his dopey smile. Esposito doesn’t buy it. He’s watching too closely for Castle to risk firing off a reply right away, but Ryan drags his partner’s attention back to the urgent issue of whether the Really Rottens ever actually broke the law.

Once he’s sure the two of them are fully invested in their dumb argument, he returns most of his attention to the phone, to crafting the perfect response, but he comes up empty. He starts something, but it’s too overt. It’s definitely over the complex, ever-shifting line between them. He backs out of that, swearing under his breath as he realizes that she’ll know he’s crafting something. He curses the is typing ellipsis of betrayal and tries to think fast.

He side-eyes the picture for inspiration. His glance falls on Lance Hastings of all people, and it’s dumb. The thing he thinks of is so dumb, but his thumbs are faster than his brain. _Ew … The guy who’s been macking on my mother makes the Inner Sanctum, too? No longer flattered._

He regrets it immediately. Sooner than immediately. It’s not just dumb, it’s … weird. And not them weird, just weird weird. Depression, frustration, embarrassment flood every cell of his body. He can’t believe he screwed this up. He can’t believe he ruined it. He stands abruptly and tells Ryan and Esposito he’s calling it a night. The two exchange confused looks. They ask if he’s okay in stereo, but he waves off their concern. He calls out to the bartender to take good care of his friends and tosses a generous cash tip on to the bar as he strides out on to the street and hurls himself into a cab.

At home, Lance Hastings is actually, literally, macking on his mother on his couch. He can’t tell if it’s insult to injury or no more than he deserves. He thinks about consoling himself with another drink, but opts for throwing himself down on the bed, fully clothed, to moan up at the ceiling instead. He’s just settling down to that when he hears a rumble on the nightstand.

He thinks he’s imagined it, at first. He’s sure he’s imagined it, because there’s no way she’ll even acknowledge his off-putting weirdness. But it rumbles again. It rumbles a third time, and he’s half afraid to pick it up. He’s half afraid that it’ll be some scathing reply ending with lose my number.

It’s not, though. It’s a picture of a picture, framed and under glass on her nightstand. There’s a lipstick smooch right next to Lance Hastings’ face and a white square of paper tucked in the corner, filled with the swoops and curls of the girliest writing he’s ever seen: _FOXCAN 4-EVER._

He laughs out loud. He laughs up at the ceiling. He laughs all the way from his belly as he thinks about her hunting up the right shade of lipstick, and his heart pounds as he pictures her puckering up and pressing a kiss to the glass. He taps out a two-thumbed reply: This round to you. Until tomorrow, Detective.

Her reply comes back right away. Just text this time: _Night, Castle._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oops. This one’s REALLY long. Sorry.


	19. Steady State—Law & Murder (3 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she first met him—when it became painfully clear that he actually was going to stick around—she assumed they’d wind up diving into bed sooner, rather than later. She pictured high-pressure tactics from him that she’d resist, right up until she didn’t, and that would be that. A one-night stand (probably) or maybe some more extended mutual itch scratching, but a fling. That’s how she assumed things would end up.

> _“Our timeline is all screwed up”  
>  —Richard Castle, Law and Murder (3 x 19)_

* * *

When she first met him—when it became painfully clear that he actually was going to stick around—she assumed they’d wind up diving into bed sooner, rather than later. She pictured high-pressure tactics from him that she’d resist, right up until she didn’t, and that would be that. A one-night stand (probably) or maybe some more extended mutual itch scratching, but a fling. That’s how she assumed things would end up.

She’d fantasized about it. Not about the sex (much), but about the aftermath. About him losing interest. She’d fantasized about him notching the bedpost or belt or whatever his preferred scorekeeping mechanism might be and then going away and leaving her in peace.

But it didn’t go that way. He’d made his unwavering interest clear. He’d rile her up with his swagger every time someone asked if they were together (and a lot of people asked if they were together). He’d reply Not yet with the coyest of coy looks. But mostly he showed up, he worked, he drove her crazy. He impressed her far more than she’d ever want to admit, and for as much as he made sure she knew the option of diving into bed at a moment’s notice was most definitely on the table, he never once made any kind of aggressive move on her.

Except he’d dug into her mother’s case. It wasn’t the move she’d been expecting at all, and when she looks back—when she still feels that corrosive flare of residual anger—she thinks part of it’s because he’d been playing a more serious game all the time. He’d been trying to get into her life, her head, her heart the whole time, not into her bed. Not just into her bed.

For a long time after that, after he’d worked his way back into her life, she assumed nothing at all would happen. It was too late. They’d been through too much for a fling to be an option, and anything other than that—anything more—was never on the table. Until it suddenly was. Until it suddenly seemed to be, and Tom presented himself as an infinitely more sensible, infinitely safer option.

Even then—even when the table was set not just with what might be, but what already was more—she tried hard to write it off to jealousy, to him suddenly wanting what he couldn’t have. And by the time she took an honest look at the evidence, at the road up to that point, it was too late again. He was walking off with an arm around his ex, and she was left kicking herself. For the summer and then some she told herself she fucking knew it—that he’d get bored and wander off the second he got what he wanted, the second he was sure he was never going to get it.

And then he’d wandered back. No. He’d fought his way back into her life, even though he was in a relationship, you know with whom. He’d stayed even after he knew that she was in a relationship. And then even after he wasn’t in a relationship anymore, and here they are.

They haven’t had their fling.

They haven’t tried and failed at something more.

There’s no accounting for this—for what they are now. There’s no accounting for the fact that it’s late and he’s stretched out beside her in the beat-up plush seat of the movie theater, his eyes fixed on the screen as he tips his head toward her.

“You gonna hog that popcorn all night?”


	20. Atlas Obscura—A Slice of Death (3 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He spots her in The Strand across three congested Saturday morning aisles, and the first thing that comes to mind is Monica Wyatt and her manufactured kismet—It was weird because it was down in the Village, and I never go down there and he said that he doesn’t go down there either.

> _“Nobody is who they seem to be.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, A Slice of Death (3 x 20)_
> 
> * * *

He spots her in The Strand across three congested Saturday morning aisles, and the first thing that comes to mind is Monica Wyatt and her manufactured kismet— _It was weird because it was down in the Village, and I never go down thereand he said that he doesn’t go down there either._

It leaves a sour taste in his mouth. A lie with a bit of literary flair and he fell for it. He never thought to question why Gordon Burns would carry a picture of this woman, not one of his daughter, until it was almost too late. Until the not-so-legendary Cavallo almost got away.

He feels a little mournful about it. He comes here and she comes here, and they’ve never run into one another. It’s an absurd thing. It’s a city of eight million people and a store that boasts eighteen miles’ worth of books. The odds of them running into one another are astronomical, but the truth is there’s something about the murder of Gordon Burns that left him feeling unnerved, unsettled, mournful.

There are the obvious things: The gruesome way his body was discovered. The fact that the man was something of a hero to him. The revelation that his daughter’s death was no accident, but rather the direct result of Burns’ own work. His obsession. All of that reverberates with photos and xeroxed newsprint and carefully lettered index cards tacked up out of sight behind white-painted shutters, but there’s something beyond the obvious, too.

He thinks about the melted snapshot of Monica Wyatt and the lone, carefully framed picture of Burns and his daughter. He thinks about fairy tales and scary stories and authenticity and how well anyone ever knows anyone else. How anger and loss and despair can so easily separate a person from who they really are—who they’d be if the world were a kinder place—and how likely it is that the moments that define the course of a life rise will rise up just when the world is at its worst.

He’s turned inward, unnerved and unsettled and absurdly mournful about the impossibility of really knowing another human being, and all of a sudden she’s there.

“Castle?” His name is a question, even though she’s standing five feet from him.

“Beckett.” The surprise in his own voice isn’t manufactured, even though he’s more or less been staring at her for who knows how long. “What are you . . .” The utterly stupid question trails off as she arches an eyebrow at him. His gaze falls on the short stack of books she has tucked under one arm. “What’ve you got?“

She pulls back at first. She turns away from him a little, putting her body between him and the neatly aligned spines. A clumsy apology tries to make its way out of his mouth, and he wonders for what. _For what?_ She turns back before the moment can get any further away from him, though. She slips a book from the center of the pile and holds it shyly out.

“Used,” she says as he takes it from her. “It’s the only one I could find. Must’ve been a run on his books.”

“This . . .” He folds the book against his chest. He hides the slim capitals spelling out his hero’s name. “It’s his best.”

“Yeah?” Her head tips to the side. It’s a wide-open invitation to tell her why heeded thinks so. To make his case, however extended it might be.

It snaps him right out of his unnerved, unsettled state of mind. He hands the book back. There’s an instant where they’re each holding one end of it. It’s a powerful point of connection. It’s immensely . . . reassuring that she wants to know. That she came looking for Gordon Burns’ books on a Saturday morning, and so did he. They’ve never run into each other before, but today they did, and she wants to know why he thinks this is the best of them.


	21. Diversion—The Dead Pool (3 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a game they play—a game they’ve played since the beginning—called Richard Castle’s Flaws. It’s not particularly sophisticated. It involves playing up, playing on, tweaking about, recitation of … well, that much is obvious.

> _“You never want more than you bargained for.”  
>  —Tommy Marcone, The Dead Pool (3 x 21)_

* * *

There’s a game they play—a game they’ve played since the beginning—called _Richard Castle’s Flaws._ It’s not particularly sophisticated. It involves playing up, playing on, tweaking about, recitation of … well, that much is obvious.

They’re the two primary players—he and she—though the boys, Montgomery, his mother, his kid, certainly get in on the action from time to time. It’s just a game. That’s what she thinks until Alex Conrad comes along, and she sees it all in a new light.

The thing about the game is it’s part make believe. He has flaws, and plenty of them. He’s never met a boundary he didn’t try to zoom right over. He really _does_ have the attention span of a cocker spaniel. He’s vain and self-centered in a dozen different ways. All of those not-so-flattering things are true, and sometimes that’s the centerpiece of the game, his actual flaws and foibles.

But sometimes the game is about not-so-flattering things she _pretends_ are true, and he plays along. And sometimes it’s the other way around: He plays up some imaginary flaw and she pretends that she hates it.

She thinks they’re in the land of make believe when Alex Conrad shows up. Partly in the land of make believe, anyway. He should have asked her. That’s certainly true, and he could do with a little bit of torture for taking her for granted.

So she woos Alex Conrad away, not that the man takes much wooing, and tells herself that she’s playing on Castle’s misplaced professional vanity—she’s reminding him who’s the sidekick here. But it goes wrong in a slow-motion, car crash kind of way.

It goes wrong with Conrad. Alex, he insists, and he calls her Kate. She mistakes it for a little bit of a tin ear on his part. They’re an hour into their evening together when she realizes it’s unfortunately more. They’re an hour and one minute into it when she realizes that he thinks he’s the one doing the wooing. He thinks he’s leading her into temptation, and not just in the writer–muse sense. It’s a little excruciating to be on the receiving end of his doubly confused overtures. It makes her feel like she’s stumbled into a double-edged kind of meanness, and she’s only half managed to extricate herself by the end of the night.

It gets worse from there. It gets worse when she realizes that it’s not just Conrad who’s misconstrued the game. She has. Badly, this time. She resists the idea at first. She gives a smug, suggestive stretch when she tells Castle how she and his protege spent an evening talking … _procedure._ She tells herself it’s their usual game, and she’s just walking the border between his actual flaws and the land of make believe.

But it’s not their usual game. He jerks Conrad back to heel, no wooing involved. He enlists some big guns and goes after his protege—his _friend_ —in a rather gruesome parody of the game the two of them have been playing for years.

It’s a surprise. It’s more than a little excruciating, because he—Castle—is usually so much kinder than she is. For all his flaws, real, make believe, and somewhere in between, she’s never known him to be mean, and she’s entirely unprepared for the gory details when she’s the one Conrad calls in the aftermath. She finds herself entirely unequipped to face the fact that it’s not her fault—it’s _certainly_ not her fault—but she’s no innocent here, either. Intentionally or not, she’s done damage.

She doesn’t know what to do about it, though, other than wander into the land of make believe. She calls him out, as though it’s entirely his fault, as though Alex Conrad’s motives are lily white and she was magnanimously doing a friend of his a favor, just as he’d failed to ask her to do. He plays along. He blusters and denies it. He pretends like he’s oblivious to his own motives. He pretends like he’s just oblivious, period, and she’s suddenly had enough of the sidelong way they come at everything, whether they’re playing the game or not.

So she calls him out. He owns up. He says he wants her all to himself, and her heart pounds. She says she’s a one-writer girl, and he lights up from head to toe.

It’s a new game entirely. It’s not a game at all


	22. Coda—To Love and Die in LA (3 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She asks for the window seat on the flight back. It’s practically the only thing she’s said since she brought Ganz down underneath the pier. It’s certainly the only thing she’s asked for, and he’d give her anything—he’d do anything if only she’d ask. She wants the window seat, so he acquiesces in a hurry.

> _“Wouldn’t you be afraid to open it?”  
>  —Kate Beckett, To Love and Die in LA (3 x 22)_

* * *

She asks for the window seat on the flight back. It’s practically the only thing she’s said since she brought Ganz down underneath the pier. It’s certainly the only thing she’s asked for, and he’d give her anything—he’d _do_ anything if only she’d ask. She wants the window seat, so he acquiesces in a hurry.

They do a clumsy dance in the aisle as he tries to step back and she tries to step in. He stumbles, and the wide armrest of the aisle seat pegs him hard in the back of the thigh. His whole leg seizes up. He lurches forward, knocking into her. She reaches out to steady him, he reaches out to steady her, and they’re awkwardly holding hands.

They’re kind of awkwardly holding hands, except there’s something pressed between their palms. He can see the edge of a piece of cheap, lined paper peeking out, blue grey and soft along the crease with handling. Royce’s note. 

“Kate.”

He turns the tangle of their fingers so hers are on top. So the note lays heavy in his hand. His heart contracts painfully for her. For _her._ That’s uppermost, even though curiosity roils beneath. He can see the reverse of letters through the thin paper, the heavy line of words struck through running straight to disappear beneath her wrist. He lays his other hand over hers. It hides the paper entirely from view. He covers the blue–green tracery of veins and tries to chafe some warmth into her skin.

“Castle.” She sounds exhausted. Utterly exhausted as she shakes her head and tugs weakly to free her fingers. “Castle, I …”

“Sorry.” His hands fly apart, releasing her. The note rests a moment in his palm. Just a moment before she takes it up again like something heavy. Something onerous and precious and private. “Sorry, we—“

“We should get settled.” She curls her fingers around the note and presses it to her chest.

“Settled,” he repeats. “Yeah.”

He manages to clear the row for her this time. She drops into the window seat, and he settles in beside her. They’re occupied with the stage business of seatbelts and the low-voiced flight attendant who’s intent on finding _something_ she wants. He empathizes. He’d give anything to give _her_ anything. But what she wants most is every bit of privacy this stupid, freezing cold metal tube can afford, so he gets it for her. He asks the flight attendant for a pillow, then waves him off in friendly, but firm and no uncertain terms.

“I’m beat,” he says. He makes a show of plumping up the pathetic little pillow. The performance draws the flicker of a smile from her. “You won’t be lonely if I sleep?”

“I’ll survive.” She rolls her eyes a little, but gives him a nod, too. Reassurance and a quiet thank you as she presses the note to her thigh, letting him see a tiny corner of it. “Go ahead.”

He nods back. He turns his face toward the aisle and arcs as much of his body as he can out of her personal space. He forces his eyes closed and tries to make his thoughts wander through territory unoccupied by her. He tries to give her privacy even in the confines of his own mind. It’s exhausting enough that he actually does drift off.

“Castle.” 

He assumes it’s a dream. Even when he feels the hesitant brush of fingers at his shoulder, he assumes it’s his own desires diving deep, then struggling to the surface, but the touch comes again, insistent this time. Annoyed. 

“Kate.” He blinks at her. “Are we …” His body checks in. His spine and hips and the awkward curve of his neck check in and answer the question he was about to ask. “We’re not …”

“We’re not,” she says, a little bit through her teeth. “Hours yet.”

“Hours?” He hauls his body around square in the seat. “Are you … okay?”

“No.” Her fingers flex fitfully on her on the arm rests. They open and close, and he sees the note is gone. “Not really.”

“Do you … want to talk?”

They both shake their heads a little miserably. It’s so unlikely.

“No, Not really,” she says again. “Can you, though?”

“Can _I_ talk?” He lifts his eyebrows. “Me?”

“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?” She lets her head fall back against the seat. She slides a tired, sideways smile at him.

He smiles back, tired and sideways. “Let’s find out.”


	23. Dramatic License—Pretty Dead (3 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She thinks about not answering the phone. It’s a ring tone she doesn’t recognize, which means it’s Castle, who’s managed to get his hands on her phone again. She wants to pick up and yell at him for messing with her stuff. She wants to see what stupid picture he’s put into her contacts for himself, and she wants him to tell her the name of the damned song, because she knows it’s The Kinks, but she can’t quite place it from the six-second snippet.

> _“This is a dark day. A sad chapter.”  
>  —Victor Baron, Pretty Dead (3 x 23)_
> 
> * * *

She thinks about not answering the phone. It’s a ring tone she doesn’t recognize, which means it’s Castle, who’s managed to get his hands on her phone again. She wants to pick up and yell at him for messing with her stuff. She wants to see what stupid picture he’s put into her contacts for himself, and she wants him to tell her the name of the damned song, because she knows it’s The Kinks, but she can’t quite place it from the six-second snippet.

She wants to answer, but she thinks she probably shouldn’t. It’s late, and she was just turning in. Her face is fresh-scrubbed and there are clean sheets on the bed. And just in general, she probably shouldn’t answer.

“Castle, it’s late.” She whisks back the comforter and top sheet and climbs beneath them.

If he senses her irritation, he’s ignoring it. _“What’s so great about Stanford?”_

“Um … it’s one of the top-ranked universities in the world. It’s on the bay. The quarter system . . .” She expects him to break in at any second, but there’s silence down the line. “Castle?”

 _“She’s following him there.”_ He sounds devastated. _“In January. She’s just … following him.”_

“Well, that’s romantic.” She can’t resist tweaking him about it, but there’s little pleasure in it. He really is devastated, for good reasons and for bad.

 _“No. It’s not. It’s …”_ She can hear rustling as he trails off. She imagines him tossing and turning on top of some million-thread-count duvet.

“Impractical?”

 _“Why can’t she see that this is exactly like him staying here?”_ He rolls right over her as though he hasn’t heard her. Maybe he hasn’t. His voice sounds muffled, like his face is mashed into the pillow, so maybe he can’t hear anything except the sound of his own wallowing.

“Because,” she sighs and looks up at her own white-painted ceiling and thinks again that, just in general, she shouldn’t have answered. “Because, it’s not transitive. It’s not a math problem, remember?”

 _“Don’t be mean,”_ he pleads. _“I know I … Don’t be mean, Beckett.”_

“I’m not!” she snaps. It’s possible that snapping undermines her point, but she really isn’t trying to be mean. _“You_ called _me,_ Castle. What do you want me to say?”

 _“That Stanford is awful!”_ he snaps right back, though she knows he doesn’t mean to any more than she did. _“That it’ll be a disaster, and she’ll hate it, and she’ll come home.”_

“And resent you for it when she does?” She manages a softer tone this time.

 _“That’s a terrible ending,”_ he grumbles. _“You’re bad at stories, you know that?”_

“Yeah, well, I have to leave you something to be good at,” she grumbles back.

 _“Good?!”_ he scoffs. _“I am_ great _at stories.”_

She rolls her eyes hard enough that he can probably hear it. “So tell yourself a good one about this.”

 _“Ashley becomes a cloistered monk. Alexis gets saddled with Debbie Winaker 2.0,”_ he rattles off without hesitation. _“She comes home and graduates_ summa cum laude _from some New York college—"_

“Which one?” she breaks in, but there’s no slowing him down.

 _“All of them,”_ he says smoothly. _“She moves into the loft across the hall and produces one grandchild when she’s forty.”_

“Does the husband get to move in across the hall, too?” She’s back to tweaking him, but he deserves it. He _so_ deserves it.

_“No. He becomes a cloistered monk. Same monastery as Ashley. They can keep each other company.”_

“What is it about your daughter that you think would drive men to vows of celibacy?” She laughs, even though she shouldn’t encourage him.

 _“They obviously realize they’re not good enough for her,”_ he says.

He’s not quite laughing, but he’s smiling and frowning at the same time, like he does. She can hear it. She can almost see it against her white-painted ceiling.

“And that’s a good ending?” She reaches up for the pull chain on the bedside lamp.

 _“No, Beckett.”_ His voice sounds stretched out and a little more distant. She pictures him reaching for his own bedside lamp. _“That is a_ great _ending.”_

“Well, then,” she yawns in the darkness. “I guess there’s nothing else to say.”

 _“Nothing else,”_ he echoes. _“But, Beckett … thanks.”_

“For telling a bad story?” she murmurs. She’s drifting off now.

 _“For telling a_ terrible _story.”_ He’s joking but not joking.

“Any time, Castle.” she says and means it, even though she shouldn’t have answered the phone


	24. All Else Fails—Knockout (3 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are in free fall. The two of them, the four of them, each one of them individually, and there is so much they have to do yet. So much they’ve already been through tonight, and so much they’ve done already. Them. Her. Not him, though he’s been convenient, he supposes. A civilian traumatized by the shocking murder of his friend in the line of duty. He’s provided a bit of cover for her at the scene, useless as he is. As he was before, during, and after this awful turn of events.

> _“We speak for the dead.”  
> _ _—Roy Montgomery, Knockout (3 x 24)_

* * *

****They are in free fall. The two of them, the four of them, each one of them individually, and there is so much they have to do yet. So much they’ve already been through tonight, and so much they’ve done already. Them. Her. Not him, though he’s been convenient, he supposes. A civilian traumatized by the shocking murder of his friend in the line of duty. He’s provided a bit of cover for her at the scene, useless as he is. As he was before, during, and after this awful turn of events.

He listens to her now. He sits with his hands dangling between his knees and the sun, impossibly, coming up outside her windows. She speaks for them all. She explains … declares what will be, what they will and will not do, what they owe. He listens, too numb to cry, too exhausted and bewildered to be angry, too useless to contribute anything but a mechanical nod of acquiescence. Esposito follows suit. Ryan, too, of course, and she stands.

They all stand. They are dismissed. They file toward the door, silent and expressionless. She leads the way past the incongruous head of Buddha. She turns the multiplicity of locks and slides back the security chain. Esposito leaves. Ryan leaves. They leave, together and absolutely apart. He moves to follow, but she catches his sleeve. She catches the very edge of it with fingers she’s scrubbed raw, chasing away every last trace of Roy Montgomery’s lifeblood.

“Castle.”

She says his name in the same gravel-throated, commanding tone she’s used since she rose to her feet amid a bloody sea of bodies. Since she began weaving the narrative they’ve told, will tell, will keep on telling. It stops him, immediately and absolutely. He draws himself up, ready for the next order. Grateful for it in some knocking-around part of his mind, but she falls silent. She falters for the first time since she rose to her feet. The door claps shut, startling both of them. Leaving them in soundless, agonizing free fall.

“Evelyn,” she manages eventually. She’s shutting down in slow motion. “The Captain’s wi—”

She can’t complete the phrase. It’s more than she can bear, and he’s disgusted with himself. He’s ashamed of the way she’s propped him up and propelled him through the horror in progress.

“Evelyn,” he prompts.

“She asked me … ” Her throat convulses. It’s a sob that makes its way into the world through the wrong senses, visible not audible.

“You spoke with her.” It’s a jolting realization, though it sounds like nothing of the kind. Try as he might to step up—to contribute something to this horror show—he feels detached from the words. From every part of his body from his lifeless hands, dangling at his sides to the heaviness of his head and the leaden weight of his chin sinking almost against his collar bones. “You were the one to … tell her. My God, Beckett.”

“She asked me to speak.” She plows onward. Her words sit at right angles to his. “She wasn’t thinking.” She’s recovering, and then she isn’t. “Not me. It shouldn’t—”

“The funeral.”

He nearly goes to floor as he says it aloud. His knees seem to disappear and he really does nearly go to the floor. He hadn’t thought about the funeral. He reaches out for the first time. His fingers find her wrist, but she winces back. There’s a bruise. His thumb just sweeps over the raised, tender swell of it before they each step back. A bruise from the hangar. From when he dragged her bodily out of harm’s way and hurt her—left actual marks on her body—because he’d failed so spectacularly before that moment.

“It should be you.” He shakes himself. He pulls in the most agonizing, difficult breath of his life. It forces everything else down. Grief, anger, fear, guilt, misery, self-loathing, exhaustion. It slams an impenetrable door on everything that is not what she needs in this moment. “Kate, of course it should be you.”

“I can’t,” she says in a voice so small, so alien to all she is that he thinks there’s someone else there with them. He blinks—actually blinks—trying to find the source of the voice in the dimly lit hallway until she goes on. Until he sees that it is somehow, irrefutably her. “I would … I would …” Her hand brushes at her cheek. She stares, uncomprehending, at the tears glistening on her fingertips. “I don’t know how. I don’t know what—what would I say?”

“The truth.” He finds clarity in the declaration. He finds strength enough for the moment to repay her in kind. “You’ll say he was your mentor and your champion and your friend. You’ll say he was a good man.” Her head snaps up. Anger flashes over her body in a white sheet, but he stands fast “He made unimaginable mistakes, and still, he was a good man.” He calls up the very grace she offered in her darkest moment. _Sir, I forgive you._ “He deserves to be remembered for more than those mistakes.”

“Can you . . .”

Her hands twist together in front of her body. She tips her head back and swallows hard. The tears get the better of her. For a shaking, shivering moment that’s somehow more terrible than any they’ve lived through yet tonight, they consume her. He wants to fold her in his arms and offer comfort, but there’s none to be had. There’s only the next thing and the next. There’s only all they have yet to do.

“Will you help me with it?” she asks when she finds her voice again. When grief relinquishes it for what is sure to be all too brief a moment.

“Of course I’ll help. As much or as little as you want.” He reaches for her hand again, carefully this time. So carefully. “You know what to say. I’ll help you find a way to say it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to those who have read these. I do have all of Season 4 and the first 9 episodes of Season 5 posted at my tumblr (pollylynn.tumblr.com). I might temporarily post those here as well.


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